“I don’t know much about that piece of evidence,” Kilmer said. “I’ll have someone on Steel’s team look into it.”
He was still sticking with plausible denial, Janis saw. But he nodded as he spoke, conveying his intention to see to it that the Walkman was delivered into Scott’s possession.
“Thanks,” Scott said.
“Was there anything else?”
Janis could sense their director’s discomfort. He would have preferred they’d had this exchange through Agent Dutch. In her peripheral vision, Janis watched Scott shake his head.
But there was something else. A big something else.
“Why didn’t you tell us about our illnesses?” she asked.
Halfway in rotating to his computer, Kilmer paused. Janis watched him for the least sign that he was going to prevaricate. As he faced them again, he patted his jacket pockets for a cigarette pack.
“We know about the cancerous mutations,” she said. “How long have you known?”
Encountering no pack, Kilmer’s hands fell to his lap.
“Twenty-five years,” he said.
“Twenty-five years?” Anger inflamed her aching head. “Were you ever going to tell us?”
Kilmer raised his hands in a hold-on gesture. “The phenomenon of what makes you the way you are is under constant study. Clinicians involved with the last Program discovered the malignant aspect of the mutation. It was latent at the time—and rest assured, it’s latent in all of you now. Before the clinical team could move onto more testing and trials…”
“The Scale appeared on the scene,” Janis finished for him. “Like now.”
The bloody image of Tyler flashed behind her eyes.
“Yes.”
Scott leaned forward in his chair. “Where are we currently? With the testing?”
“Things have changed since the last group. As a program, we’re far more compartmentalized. That’s for everyone’s safety. A group of clinicians have your cells. They’re studying them to understand the mutations that give you your powers … and, yes, that will one day compromise your health.”
Yeah, that’s putting it nicely, Janis thought.
“I don’t have access to their research,” Kilmer continued, “but I understand they’re working on a serum—one that switches off the destructive aspect of the mutation while preserving your powers.”
“Should we be optimistic?” Scott asked.
“To this point, all testing has been in vitro. I’m supposed to be notified when they’re ready to begin testing the drug on live subjects. On you.”
“And you haven’t heard anything yet?” Janis said.
“No, not yet.”
Janis nodded and chewed the inside of her cheek. She struggled for how she should feel. Kilmer had deliberately kept them in the dark, lying to all of them by omission. The knowledge prodded Janis’s seething anger. But hadn’t she lied to Margaret by omission the night before and for the same reason? Because someone had told her not to share the information?
“Well, thanks for your time,” she said, standing.
Scott stood beside her. “How long before our mutations become, you know, deadly?”
Janis looked from her boyfriend to Director Kilmer. She had purposely not asked the question herself. She wanted their focus to remain on preventing the impending murder of a teammate. But now that the question was out there, Janis found that she needed to know, as well.
Director Kilmer studied them gravely. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”
“Then I’m afraid we can’t help you with your search for Jesse,” she shot back.
“Janis…”
“I can understand keeping secrets from the rest of the world, but you can no longer keep secrets from us.” Janis wondered dimly if her fury came from her self-admission that she had done the same thing to Margaret.
“It’s for your own safety.”
“Bullshit!” Janis cried.
Kilmer’s eyes faltered. He licked his dry lips.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Janis said, “but you—”
“With your generation,” he said slowly, “for reasons that aren’t yet understood, the harmful aspects of the mutation are developing at a faster rate. They could switch on at any time. The clinical team is keeping a close eye on the oldest Champions. Nothing so far, but…”
“What about the Scale?” Janis asked, the fight crashing from her. “How are their members still alive?”
“We think they’ve already developed a drug,” Kilmer replied.
Janis noticed Scott reaching into his jacket pocket. With a sudden thought, she arrested his hand before it could emerge with the empty vial he had found in Mr. Shine’s house.
His glasses went askew as he jerked around to face her.
Not yet, she said, feeling a stronger-than-ever urge to protect the man’s identity. Mr. Shine still has a role to play, I think.
Fine, but you’re cutting off my circulation.
Sorry. She released her hold and turned back to Kilmer.
“I … I appreciate your honesty,” she said. “We’ll do whatever we can to help.”
Behind his large desk, Director Kilmer looked smaller than Janis had ever seen him. He dipped his head.
“Thank you,” he murmured.
13
The Witch allowed herself a small smile as she looked over the team assembled before her.
Candlelight flickered around them, throwing their differences into shadowy relief. Like the candles, the members were various sizes, various shapes. Some from the original team, others younger, more recently acquired. Even the differences in their temperaments were evident in the spectral light. Titan carrying his heavy air of impatience. Shadow sitting back coolly, legs crossed. Techie with his anxious tics. The others had their own tells.
And yet, despite their outward differences, the Witch felt a strong symmetry, as though a unifying force tethered one to the others, forming a perfect web. A web whose center she occupied.
The Witch’s face hardened as she shut her eyes and focused on the opening incantation: “We live in a chaotic world.” The rest of the room joined her in a somber choir. “A world that, left to itself, would fall unto ruin and damnation. We are the chosen, duty bound to maintain order and balance and to defeat any and all who would oppose our purpose. We are the Scale.”
She fed additional energy into the final words, feeling the web that bound them pulse like vital arteries. When she opened her eyes, their gazes were affixed on hers. Even Techie had stopped fidgeting.
She did not waste time on a greeting. “The power shift to the West is gaining momentum,” she intoned. “I have foreseen the result, and it is dire, more so than when Gorbachev came to power. The sphere of influence of the United States will grow while that of the Soviet Union diminishes. Absent the balance of opposing superpowers, the world will succumb to chaos. Nuclear wars, genocide, mass migrations, starvation. This apocalypse I have foreseen.”
Titan adjusted his eye patch to free a lock of graying hair. “So we gonna take out Reagan this time?”
The Witch heard the hunger in his voice. Titan had developed a taste for world leaders, beginning with President Kennedy. “No,” she said. “At this point, the U.S. will continue to push its advantage no matter who occupies the White House. Our current strategy does not focus on leaders but on the superheroes who have given the West their advantage.”
“Hell,” Titan grumbled, “we’ve done everything you and the boss told us.”
The Witch nodded. “Yes, you have. The shortcoming has been our own. In trying to achieve the optimal outcome with the least input, we were too conservative. Two of their teams are wounded and in hiding, yes. The third team was supposed to have followed in kind, but did not. As long as the so-called Champions remain engaged in the world, chaos and destruction loom.”
“How come you didn’t foresee that?” Shadow asked.
The Witch was glad for the shroud of darkness to hide her irritation. She pre
ferred Titan’s forthright challenges to Shadow’s subtle jabs. Where he broadcast himself for all to hear, Shadow’s motives swirled deep below her dark skin. And whenever she spoke lately, it was with an edge of rebellion.
The Witch used her powers of foresight on all of them, of course. It was how she had built her web and maintained its strength over the years. But she was especially vigilant when it came to Shadow.
“I did foresee it,” she countered, feeding energy into the words. “They were to have gone into hiding like the others. It is clear now that we must be more forceful in placing them there. But do not worry. I have asked some of you to position their members or to position yourselves in relation to them. With this, you have done exceedingly well. The time has come to touch flames to fuses and stand back.”
“Well, what about Reggie?” Titan asked. “What are you keeping him around for?
“As our one expendable member, he is currently our most valuable.”
“The hell is that supposed to mean? I’ve been waiting years to get my hands on that son of a bitch and all you have us do is strap him to Techie’s doo-hicky, which held him all of a week.”
Techie’s narrow face screwed up but he knew better than to talk back to Titan.
“Reginald is more in our control than ever,” the Witch answered evenly. “That was the point.”
“Yeah, but he don’t work for the Scale,” Titan said. “Not really. He’s still one of them.”
“If you are implying that he will try to help the other side, I have never doubted otherwise. We have turned that to our advantage. Very soon you will see the payoff. Should he survive the encounter, we will have no more need of his services. You may do with him what you like.”
Titan ground a huge fist into his palm and grinned. “I like the sound of that.”
“Sure you’re seeing twenty-twenty?” Shadow asked, again with that blade of challenge.
The Witch almost answered, but then drew into herself to make sure. The room turned red as she watched the events play out. She allowed a small smile to creep onto her lips. When she returned, she dabbed a trickle of brain fluid from her brow and looked pointedly at Shadow.
“Yes, my dear. I see it all quite clearly.”
14
Spruel household
Saturday, December 21
11:40 a.m.
Scott removed the back cover of the Walkman and set it beside the scatter of tiny screws on one side of the workbench. With the tip of a Phillips screwdriver, he roamed around the Walkman’s copper reel tables and green flex cables. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for. In a corner of the circuit board, someone had soldered a small card with a tiny electret microphone and components to encode spoken messages into modulated radio waves.
As he poked around the card, he thought again about what Mr. Shine had said in Saudi Arabia:
We’ve got someone a little like you, Scott. Good with electronics.
A bit of an understatement. Besides being small and efficient, the card blended seamlessly with the rest of the Walkman. You wouldn’t see it unless you were looking for it, and the card wouldn’t even activate unless you plugged the headphones into an auxiliary port. Scott had to admit that his own efforts would have produced something far less elegant.
And is that a scrambler? he thought. Color me awed.
As Scott’s professional respect for the designer swelled, his hope that the transceiver might lead him anywhere deflated further. Anyone who had exercised that degree of care in engineering the device to transmit and receive wouldn’t suddenly become reckless. He would have deactivated the other transceiver the moment Jesse boarded the Scale’s helicopter in Saudi Arabia.
When Scott shut his eyes, he saw Janis’s pained face. His heart ached for her. She was bearing so much: her bloody premonitions—the most recent one starring Tyler—and now the knowledge that their mutations would soon eat away at them. Probably starting with her sister.
Which made success here that much more crucial, he thought. Not only would it prevent a murder, but finding the Scale could also lead to the drug that was keeping their members alive.
Plus, it would cheer up Janis.
With a nod, Scott donned his Champions helmet and plugged a wire he had rigged to his communication system into the Walkman. He flicked the Walkman’s mode switch to the FM band. Static crackled over Dire Strait’s “Money For Nothing.” The capacitor on the small card was modulated to transmit at the high end of the radio frequency. Voices and music climbed in and out of the static sea as Scott thumbed the tuning wheel up. At 108, a quiet hiss filled his hearing.
Dead air.
Or is it?
He tapped the microphone three times with a finger as he focused into the card. He felt the electronic components converting the brusque sounds into sine waves. The waves, beating millions of cycles per second, converged on the antenna and scattered off. Scott strained to follow them. His target was wherever the waves were being received and decoded back into sound.
But even with the helmet focusing his power, Scott felt himself falling from the signal after only a short distance, rematerializing back in the hidden workshop.
Crapola.
He tried again with several more taps but with no more success.
Double crapola.
It was as Scott had feared. Never mind whether or not there was another active transceiver, he simply couldn’t remain inside the dispersing signal to find it. There wasn’t enough direction, enough energy. The thought of sharing his failure with Janis killed him, but the sooner he did so, the better. They were going to have to come up with an alternate plan.
He was grasping the cord to disconnect from the Walkman when a noise sounded in his earpiece.
A tap.
Scott froze before snorting out an embarrassed laugh. The sound had come from the jiggle of the plug in the—
Tap.
Tap-tap.
Scott’s breathing went shallow. He hadn’t touched the plug that time. The sound was coming from another device. Scott listened. He had learned Morse Code back when he and Janis owned a pair of walkie-talkies. This code was repeating, telling the receiver to expect transmission.
From the cabinet, Scott grabbed a pen and a notepad.
Was this someone from the Scale? Was he on the verge of eavesdropping on a secret communication?
His pen trembled above the paper. This could prove to be the break he and Janis had been looking for, praying for. The pattern of taps and pauses changed. Scott sketched them out as dots and lines. When the pattern began to repeat, he tuned out the sound and translated what he had written, penning out the letters. The message was short, five words:
YOU WILL NEVER FIND ME.
As the cold realization hit Scott that the words were intended for him, he heard the pattern change. He sketched and translated it. The message was a single word this time. An addendum:
MAGGOT.
Scott recoiled as though he’d been slapped across the face.
The awe Scott had felt for the person moments before became lost to an upsurge of anger. The person was taunting him, insulting him. He knew the type: tech-heads and hackers who loved nothing more than to stand atop their own triumphs in order to piss on everyone else’s. They couldn’t help themselves. They were ultracompetitive by nature. Not to mention royal dicks.
Scott would just have to find a way to use that to his advantage.
Tamping down his anger, he wrote a two-word response, translated it into Morse, and tapped it out.
GAME ON.
He thought for a moment, then attached his own addendum.
BITCH.
“How do you know he’ll keep his transceiver on?” Janis asked.
“Trust me,” Scott answered above the rumble of the station wagon. “He will. Our little exchange this morning elevated his engineering project—a damn good one, I’ll admit—into a full-fledged contest. He’s going to want to keep tabs on my progress. And now t
hat he knows I’ll answer him…”
“He’s hooked,” Janis finished for him. “What did he sound like?”
“Our exchange was all in code.” As he scooted into the next lane, Scott considered how it had felt safer communicating through anonymous taps rather than revealing his voice. Maybe his counterpart had felt the same way. “But I imagined a voice like Wayne’s, only more annoying.”
That made Janis smile. “Who else knows about your exchange?”
“Just you. If word gets back to Kilmer that I’m communicating with the Scale, he’ll pull us like that.” Scott snapped his fingers. “And no offense to Steel’s team, but they don’t know this guy like I do.”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you this competitive.”
“Hey, the guy called me a maggot.”
Janis chuckled, then leaned forward, her eyes angling upward. “Is that it?” she asked.
Scott followed her gaze to the red and white broadcast tower spearing above the trees. “Yup,” he said. “Eight hundred feet tall, three hundred kilowatts of power, broadcast range of a hundred plus miles.”
“And you think your new friend rigged something to it.”
“The transmitter he installed in the Walkman is powerful for its size, but its range is still limited. A few miles, maybe. Unless his transceiver is within that range, there’s no communicating. Maybe it was his ‘you’ll never find me’ dig, but something tells me he’s not in that range. Which means he would have had to set up a repeater—something that would collect the signal and rebroadcast it.”
“Extending the range,” Janis said, turning the Walkman over in her hands.
“Exactly. Now, there are radio antennas all over the place, but this guy’s into power. And in transmission terms, you can’t get much more powerful than the TV broadcasting station for the region.”
Scott steered the station wagon off the highway and onto a side road. Five minutes later, he was pulling up alongside a security fence that enclosed the tower and what looked like a pair of service buildings. As they slammed their doors, Janis craned her neck back.
XGeneration (Book 6): Greatest Good Page 7